"The perfect is the enemy of the good"

I've heard this repeated many times and finally looked it up: Voltaire said it. In its spirit, I am posting a recording of the Bach prelude and fugue that I've been working on.

As usual, I wished for so much more for this piece: I wanted the prelude to be sparkling and clean yet melancholy at the same time; I wanted the fugue to be beautiful and brooding, with perfect trills. Not quite there! But at the same time, I did learn and memorize this in the shortest time I've spent on a WTC pair: 3 months. This is one of the easier ones; for one thing, in the prelude, the left hand is much easier than the right, and the fugue is meant to be fairly slow. Listening to it, what bothers me most about my performance is the predictable "marchiness" of the thing. Ah well.

I recorded this in one take. There was some problem with how my recorder was set; I hear some clipping and a little distortion. I may work on this some more and perhaps try recording it again, but for now, here it is:

Bach Prelude and Fugue, Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, No. 6 in D minor